Random and Arbitrary thoughts, rants, opinions, and musings.
From a sometimes cynical and cranky Mom.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Daily Alaska...my big backyard!

For some reason the mountains around us the past couple of days have seemed bigger. It could be that they have more snow on them again, or that I get used to them and just don't always see them. As in really pay attention to them, not in as they vanish or anything. I am still not used to seeing mountains out there every day. Right there, out my back door.

Last night, right out the back door, we had a visitor. She ate some of our bushes, and left a little pile of poo by the neighbor's fence. Tess was working at the computer when Abe started barking, around 8:30, I think. She looked out the back door and saw a moose reaching over the fence eating our bushes! No wonder the dogs were getting excited. There was an interloper in their yard. (In the photo above, the bushes on the right were the same height as the bushes on the left before the moose showed up...)

This was taken from upstairs...I like the enormous shadow of the moose behind her.

The moose snacked on several of our bushes, cropping close to a foot off of a couple of them. Then she wandered along the fence to the neighbor's yard, where she laid down in the snow for quite a while. We could see her ears sticking up. She was just laying there. It's really quiet around our neighborhood on winter evenings.I too this photo this morning. Those are all moose tracks, the area to the right is where she laid down for a while -- we thought it would be a bigger area. The brown up to the left I believe is some poo.

When the moose got up, she nosed at our bushes a little more and then wandered around the side of the house. Tess and I and the dogs were looking out the window at her, and she stepped closer to the window, seeming to look at us. It was a little freaky, she was just a couple feet from us. Then Mojo jumped up at the window barking furiously and she spun around and walked off across the street. Mojo startled the heck outta Tess and I, jumping up like that. It was dark and hard to get any good photos, but there are moose tracks leading from our window, and the moose is standing eating a tree across the street.

A while later the moose was right in front of our house, two feet from the front window. We locked the dogs in the bathroom at that point, because I was rather concerned for the windows and the woodwork. I took a couple photos, but they really didn't turn out too well because it was so dark. (They all have a yellowish cast because our outdoor lights are yellow. They also come on slowly, which is great when there is a moose around, because it doesn't flash on and startle them. Handy.)One of the last photos I took turned out to look like there is the ghost of a moose walking through our yard.

It was pretty dang fun and exciting to have a moose wandering around last night, although I think it is a little hard on the dogs. They were quivering with excitement or something while we were all standing looking out at the moose. And it was lucky we have a DVR, because we had to keep rewinding and pausing whatever it was were watching, because the moose was far more compelling than any TV show...

Hi Julie! Great pics and stories of what's happenin way up north. Noticed that moose pic, the first one, has a cool halo in the background. Don't think I would go on a frozen ferris wheel. Those carny rides are much more fun when it's hot out and we're trying to catch a breeze to cool off. Remember me,Vickie

Okay -- updating my profile because I never removed the guinea pigs from it, even though they have been elsewhere for months.

Um...new obsession (HA) the elliptical trainer in the garage. I hate the thing, but today I burned 395 calories. I know. I so wanted to burn 5 more to make it an even 400, but then I would be at 50 minutes and 19 seconds, so I would have to make that round out to an even 51 minutes, and then the mileage could be rounded up to a more even number, and then the calories would be just a few away from 450, but then I could do just a few more seconds, then another few hundredths of a mile, and so on until finally I would fall off, hit my head, end up in the hospital with another nasty concussion, and gain weight because I am bedridden. It was so much easier to just burn the 395 calories.

We moved from the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona to the almost Arctic of Anchorage. I like the winters of Anchorage better than the summers of Tucson, so far.

Still have three kids, the oldest one is a freshman at the U of Arizona (dang it, now I will have to edit this again in a few months), the other two live on Fort Richardson with me and the dogs and the husband.

Other obsessions...my camera, my IPod Touch, my sewing machine. Fabric. Definitely fabric. Dishes. It's a thing females in my family have, an obsession with dishes. Pottery, and earthenware. Silver, definitely. Not crystal and china though. I am not a big fan of the fussy and overly ornate, and both crystal and china tend to fall into those categories, to me. Plus if I have delicate dishware, then I can't have the kids wash the dishes or put it in the dishwasher.

Other than that, I weigh too much, sleep too little, am very liberal, rabidly pro-choice, find it insane this country does not have universal health care, and think the world may be a better place with Obama at the helm. Oh, yeah, and chocolate. Much much chocolate.